NY mostly ignored reports warning of superstorm

Sunday

Dec 9, 2012 at 6:00 AMDec 9, 2012 at 7:23 AM

By Michael Gormley THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

More than three decades before superstorm Sandy, a state law and a series of legislative reports began warning New York politicians to prepare for a storm of historic proportions, spelling out scenarios eerily similar to the actual events: a towering storm surge, overwhelming flooding, swamped subway lines and widespread power outages. The Rockaway peninsula was deemed among the “most at risk.”

But most of the warnings and a requirement in a 1978 law to create a regularly updated plan for the restoration of “vital services” after a storm went mostly unheeded, either because of tight budgets or the lack of political will to prepare for a hypothetical storm that may never hit.

Some of the thorniest problems after Sandy, including a gasoline shortage, the lack of temporary housing and the flooding of commuter tunnels, ended up being dealt with largely on the fly.

“I don’t know that anyone believed,” acknowledged Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week. “We had never seen a storm like this. So it is very hard to anticipate something that you have never experienced.”

Asked how well prepared state officials were for Sandy, Cuomo said, “not well enough.”

It was not as if the legislative actions over the years were subtle. They all had a common, emphatic theme: Act immediately before it is too late.

The 1978 executive law required a standing state Disaster Preparedness Commission to meet at least twice a year to create and update disaster plans. It mandated the state to address temporary housing needs after a disaster, create a detailed plan to restore services, maintain sewage treatment, prevent fires, assure generators “sufficient to supply” nursing homes and other health facilities, and “protect and assure uninterrupted delivery of services, medicines, water, food, energy and fuel.”

Reports in 2005, 2006 and 2010 added urgency. “It’s not a question of whether a strong hurricane will hit New York City,” the 2006 Assembly report warned. “It’s just a question of when.”

A 2010 task force report to the Legislature concluded: “The combination of rising sea level, continuing climate change and more development in high-risk areas has raised the level of New York’s vulnerability to coast storms. The challenge is real, and sea level rise will progress regardless of New York’s response.”

The Disaster Preparedness Commission met biannually, but there are gaps in which there is no record of a meeting. However, some administrations, including Cuomo’s, convened many of the same agency heads to discuss emergency management. But even under Cuomo, who has taken a much greater interest in emergency management after three violent storms in his first two years in office, there are still three vacancies on the commission.

Richard Brodsky, a former New York Democratic assemblyman who was chairman of the committee that created the 2006 report, credits administrations with making some improvements to the plan in recent years, such as requiring a specific plan to protect and evacuate the infirmed and to save pets.

“But on two issues related to Sandy — prevention and recovery — they did almost nothing,” Brodsky said. “If Goldman Sachs was smart enough to sandbag its building, why wasn’t the MTA smart enough to sandbag the Battery Tunnel?”

Among the crises Cuomo and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg faced on a daily basis during Sandy were the shortage of temporary housing, which continues, the long disruption of electricity and gasoline, generators in health care facilities swamped by floodwaters, restoring power from swamped electrical infrastructure and repairing commuter rail lines.

“What you’ve got here is a great number of consequences that were foreseeable, but unforeseen,” Brodsky said. “Prevention is politically less sexy than disaster response.”